Factualización de lo indecidible: contra la Figura poética del «quizá» (o del militante filosófico)

This essay offers a critique of Quentin Meillassoux's factual speculation, whose principle of factuality holds that the only necessity is the absolute contingency of every entity. The analysis begins with some philosophical implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems in order to establish a criterion: the undecidability of the propositions these theorems establish holds exclusively for formal languages and authorizes no thesis whatsoever about nature or about natural languages. On the basis of this criterion, four Figures derived from the principle of factuality are posited: two ontic ones—the consistency of the "there is" (F1) and non-contradiction (F2)—and two ontological ones—the kenotype (F3) and the non-being of the Whole (F4). The ontological Figures collapse through a twofold chained displacement, namely, the transfer of the syntax of a formal language into an ontological statement, and the transfer to the plane of being of conclusions that concern only the limits of our knowledge. This collapse extends to the poetic Figure of the May-Being (F5), which is derived from a numerological view of Stéphane Mallarmé's poem "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard" and the notes on philosophical militancy in Alain Badiou. The analysis reveals a postmodern use of Cantor's theorem in the reading of Mallarmé's poem, and thus concludes by arguing that Meillassoux derives a last Figure of the providential philosopher grounded in the illegitimate invasion of incompleteness into a work written in natural language.